


Linger

by brittlelimbs



Category: Brooklyn (2015)
Genre: Adultery, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Cunnilingus, Dirty Talk, Eilis is indecisive, F/M, Fingering, Frottage, Pregnancy Kink
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-17
Updated: 2016-07-19
Packaged: 2018-07-15 16:47:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7230583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brittlelimbs/pseuds/brittlelimbs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eilis had forgotten the greenness of Enniscorthy. </p><p>Or: Jim Farrell shows Eilis exactly what her husband's missing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> usual unbeta'd bullshit ayyy  
> happy to write something that isn't star wars for a change!

Eilis had forgotten the greenness of Enniscorthy. She’d tried to take it with her, of course, just a little woven into the kelly of her woolen coat on her back when she’d left her only familiar horizon. But America has proved to be brassy and bright and a great number of things that tend to leave green on the wayside, as it were. Lots of steam, sidewalks, people walking with their coat collars popped up to brush the brims of their hats.

Jim’s eyes aren’t green but they aren’t quite—not. Eilis doesn’t know the color for certain.

“Eilis,” he says again, and she quickly turns her head away to the safety of the pillow, flushing with the kind of secret mortification that Rose described, that only young women know. _Giddy girls_ , Ms. Kehoe had shrilled. Eilis is a giddy girl.

Jim leans long over her a little further, casting his shadow more deeply, creating a warm, dark space that smells of clean cotton and cigarettes. His tie hangs silken and limp from his neck, laying down between them and pooling in between her flushed breasts, her popped blouse buttons. His bed is big and lonely. So is his house; too much old money, too much space, everything quiet and very un-American and a lot of things that Eilis had once felt suffocated by but now misses with a pining that verges on madness.

His gaze prickles on her profile.

“He’s Italian,” he says, and Eilis catches a quiet gasp between her teeth, feeling a heat right down to the core of her; she’d forgotten this, too, how quick and fast and mean a place can be when you’re growing up in each other’s pockets. The bite of _exposure_ feels too shameful and too good at the same blinding moment to do anything but nod, pillow crisp against the hot pulse beating in her ear. Maybe the entire town knows, church and sundry alike.

He shifts his weight a little so he can bring his hand to hers, pressing his thumb into her open palm and twisting so he can see the back of her hand. He lowers his mouth to the deliberate emptiness, and she fantasizes that she can feel the uncovered strip of skin burn under his lips.

“Is this a new American fashion, too? I’m unfamiliar. Never left the country.” Slim bathing suits and missing wedding rings. Another neat American trick.

She squirms as he scrapes his teeth over the soft skin of her knuckle; she can’t answer him, doesn’t know how. His hair is russet and his eyelashes are white where they’re gentled across his cheeks, closed in contemplation. She lets him place her hand back down on the sheets, next to her head, so she’s looking at the curl of her lax fingers. Then, all at once, he’s parsing gently through the rustling polyester of her skirt and there’s a hand on her thigh and Eilis feels like the sensation of her hose under fingers is going to itch her skin right off.

“Your little Italian, Eilis—tell me.” Higher, higher, he reaches, until those dexterous fingers are rubbing gently against the cotton of her panties. Eilis thinks that the space between her legs might burn hotter than Father Flood’s Catholic hell.

The only one who’d—Tony—Jim slips his hand higher, working his hand underneath the high elastic of the waist, and then plunging back down again. The stiff pleats of her skirt tent up and rustle around his elbow, skillfully crooked, sinfully obvious.

Rugby boys. She has half a mind to make a pointed comment.

And then Eilis can’t think at all, words evaporated right off her tongue, because he’s found her.

“Did he do this?”

He moves, swirling a finger around the hot nub of her clit, and she _keens_ before she can draw her lips up tight, pleasure too straight-hot, too perfect. Suddenly he’s right there, and it’s not their first kiss, but it’s their best. His lips are wide and plush and Eilis thinks of everything that Tony is not.

She is kissing Jim Farrell, and sound when they part is somehow too sweet-soft to contain the obscenity of this.

“He is my husband,” she whispers. Oh, she might be hotter than she has ever been. She is on fire. “It is his right.”

He hums, kneeling back, and Eilis is left blinking into the bright space of his absence for a moment, before he starts shucking her free of her panties in earnest. She can feel the cool breath of air on the wetness between her legs, and blushes higher; this is real, now, more than ever.

Her underwear are caught on the hooks of her curled toes before being flung away, gone completely. Next comes this skirt, the neat sound of the zipper sinfully loud against their breath. And then-- it takes her a moment to figure out what he’s getting at. Here she is, naked save for her half-sodded blouse, and for some reason he’s not freeing himself from his slacks, hasty and hungry.

Or hungry, maybe, but not to splay her legs around his waist, pull her onto his cock. She is confused. He’s disentangling himself, instead, box springs squealing as he gracelessly knees up off the bed and takes his place at its side. She thinks, for a black, bottomless moment, that he’s going to leave her. Then he kneels at the edge and takes her naked thighs in his hands, brings them up to the pressed cotton slopes of his shoulders, and arranges her perfectly to. To.

Her husband, for all his gentle hand holding and warm kisses lilting, appealing earnest, has never done _this_.

Jim Farrell is kissing the most imitate part of her, and Eilis is half-sure she is going to die.

He looks up as finishes the long path of his tongue up, up, some of that blazer-jacket pomaded confidence written loose on his pink mouth. Then pauses.

“Surely he must’ve--How does he fuck you, Eilis,” he says, cheek rumbling against her thigh.

She doesn’t want to know what kind of mess she must look.

“Not l-like this,” she mumbles.

He looks surprised. Eilis wants to hid her face in the pillows again; it’s mortifying. Something her own husband had never dared do, not once, and here Jim is, already leaning down to lap up more.

She wants to laugh with the delirium; how had she traveled so far, searched so long, when this was what was waiting for her in the sleepy, rolling hills of Enniscorthy. He takes her with wide, flat passes of his wet tongue, feasting the way a starving man might, whetting his appetite with an eagerness that takes her breath right from her lips. The sight of him pressed between her thighs is unbearably intimate, but she’s hooking her hands in his hair, tugging him impossibly closer. He moans at the pulling, and the vibration of it is unlike anything Eilis has ever had the pleasure of experiencing.

It’s sloppy and wet, lips to lips, and she can feel the heat blooming outwards from her belly so, so, quickly. 

He has to hold her hips when he starts to suck her clit, her hips bucking into him, that mouth slick and tight and pulling sounds from her body that she never thought possible, never knew her throat could make.

Jim Farrell is a Good Boy, her mother said, but Eilis is learning fast: Jim Farrell is not a good boy in any sense of the word. 

Suddenly, he pulls away. 

“Even in your wedding bed?” he says, and _oh Lord_ sheis going to combust _._ “He never--?” His chin and lips are shining, and his breath is humid against her but not nearly enough. No, not at all.

“No!” Eilis cries, head nearly thrashing against the sheets. “No. Never.” _Don't stop!_ She wants to say instead. _Dear God don’t ever stop, please, never._ She thinks of the last time with Tony, his sweet dark eyes, his gentle lovemaking. Good, but different, not this at all; two diametrically opposed languages in the script of her body.

Jim reads her perfectly. He leans in with something like a smile but a little more secret, and opens his mouth wide to bare his teeth, graze their ivory edge against the swollen mound of her clit. It’s too much. It’s too much. Jim Farrell is eating her alive with his wet, raspy tongue and his soft soft lips and Eilis has never been so certain of heaven in her life. Her prayers, where are her prayers—they’ve left her, now, she knows, because she has never committed a sin greater than this. Adulterous. Flushed-hot, secret and lovely.

Her legs tremble around his ears. The heat in her belly is unbearable.

“Come here, Eilis,” he says into the heat of her, brogue rumbling, certain. “Come home.”

If Tony is on her mind when she does, hands clinging into the sheets, she does not remember.

 

Eilis had forgotten the greenness of Enniscorthy, she thinks. Of Ireland, of the place she had here in the hills.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jim finds Eilis again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> written on my phone at mostly 5:30 in the morning-- errors aplenty. just had to write this shit
> 
> pregnancy is discussed in this for those who don't like !

 

  
The chairs in the Farrell’s dining room are oaken, heavy things. Straight-backed, stained to match the long, dark table, built solid with a sense of sharp-crafted propriety. Makes Eilis imagine the kind of childhood Jim might’ve had in these chairs; quiet dinners, family politics couched in soft spoken conversation and austere, starched napkins. She wonders if his parents had the same kind of right angles, and if he was obedient to them. Seen and unheard.  
She nucks her face into the soft skin of his neck, and misusing these historied chairs-- _doing this_ \-- might be a crime, but Eilis is truly wallowing in the indulgent guilt that comes with it.

She meant not to.

Jim Farrell and everything about him, house and height, all of it--Too beautiful. Too lonely, too full of flush-hot memories for Eilis to stand this place for a second longer without snapping into two brittle halves from the stress of it. She knows this. Knows some other things, now, too: home might be here in some sense, but home is _there_ in others, one seasick journey across the Atlantic away; she'd been terrified of that distance, just for a second, giddy-girl stupid and aching with this sense of new-in-old. Falling in love with this fresh lushness, pink mouth and green isle.  
No longer; smartened-up, fleeing, now, arching home towards righteous arms.  
Or, at least, until she very decisively  _isn't._  
"Eilis," he says, and the chair creaks as she draws her hips up again, further, harder, and gasps breath-high at the friction. It's wrong: he's still done up in slacks, fastened high on his trim waist, suspenders crisply yoked around his shoulders. Bare a wrinkle in his soft, grey button-down where she's pressed against his chest, bareness of her breasts and belly grazing the cotton of his shirt as she rubs up against him.  
She's naked. Entirely, mortifyingly so; the dull shine of his leather shoes on the hardwood looks obscene by comparison.  
He was fresh from the office when he found her, smoke lingering on his overcoat from the brisk walk home, briefcase with its fancy silver fastens dangling from his fingertips as he latched the door, turned.  
She’ll wonder, later, on what thoughts occupied his mind while he was walking up the drive. What keyturn-doorway-foyer daydreams she'd so rudely interrupted. Finance, maybe. Her. The general election. She didn't know; all that mattered was the sight of his face opening instantly from distracted to spectacularly agape. Burglar! Caught red-handed searching for the cardigan she'd forgotten when he took her to to pieces the other night. Guilty, half pleased she'd been discovered, knowing precisely what it meant to return here, and the other half anxious with the knowledge that if she didn't leave now, she never would, hands running desperate over wardrobes and under beds. Ready to say damn the sweater anyways, ready to run--

  
His thigh bucks gently between her legs, brushing just so against the need budding there, and she might cry from the sheer not-enoughness of it. His pants are fine cut, soft sewn and well-made, as everything about him is; he cups a hand on her nape, tipping her dizziness towards his hunger to kiss her again, and her embarrassment ratchets ever higher; his slacks are tangibly expensive and she's doing a brilliant job of ruining them on nothing more than the solid, wide warmth of his leg between hers. The twill is _soaking_. Eilis can feel it, hot on her cheeks: the shame of being wet, and caught, and hopelessly laid low as he watches her try to eek out the tiniest and most desperate of pleasures against him.  
He should be smirking, she thinks. Might be petty reason enough to try and hate him. Pretend he’d been rough when he shucked his unexpected houseguest her free of her clothes, set her to squirming on his lap. But he's not smirking, and he was so gentle, and oh. He’s looking at her like he can't imagine how he got here, flush faced, slack jawed, stiffening against the inseam of his pant leg as if struck stupid to have something so exquisite as her rut herself on his lap.  
He speaks, then, apropos of nothing:  
“What would it be like to send you back--full. I wonder.”  
She presses a palm to his chest to better feel the vibrations of his voice, suss out meaning.  
“What?” Her voice sounds too quiet in comparison.  
There's a pause, in which Jim’s brows draw together, and it takes Eilis a moment to realize that he’s embarrassed.  
“You know,” he says, like she should.  
She slows, and his hand slips from riding the pitch-jump rhythm of her thigh to the down of her belly, awkwardly cupping. He’s colored to his cheekbones, now, but his gaze does not waver.  
“You're going back,” he says abruptly, palm sliding down, down, but Eilis doesn't notice because her heart is too busy dropping straight out from her toes. To flirt at the edge of this idea is one thing, and to look him in the face and acknowledge it is something else entirely. All at once she fears breaking this limbo so badly that her stomach aches with it.  
“I--” she starts, then stops at once: the deliciously rough pad of his finger has homed into the heat of her, crooking up to massage the hot, swollen spot where she needs most. “I'm--Ah!”  
“Indulge me, then. Please, Eilis,” he mumbles, hooking his chin over her shoulder. His grip shifts, and two fingers squeeze inside, thumb rubbing lazy circles around her clit. He holds her with the other as she startles, pulling her close so she can draw her arms around his neck. The chair creaks again, but holds steady.  
“To think of you, like that--” _full_ , he whispers again, _full_ , like some kind of prayer, brushing warm over cheek and curved shell of her ear. Now Eilis begins to understand.  
“He wouldn't know, not at all. That it was mine. We’d make sure.” He curls his fingers inside her, making her sigh against his neck and let her vision go all blurry-soft.  
“I'd make sure it took, too. I’d take you, again and again, until there was no possibility that it hadn't.” He shivers. “Can you imagine, love, that horribly lonely journey, and being certain that a part of me was with you? In Brooklyn-- letting him swoon at the sight of you for nine months, kiss your belly, and know for each of them that I was the one who made you so lovely?”  
She looks under her lashes between them, then, and watches a drop of her wetness roll down the pale width of his wrist. _Oh,_  but she’s is coming apart at the seams. Her eyes are squeezed shut, trying with everything she has to keep from riding his fingers in earnest. He scoops his hand up her back and into the thatch of wilting pincurls at the nape of her neck, continuing. “It wouldn't look like him at all. Not one drop Italian. Redheaded, even. I’d reckon it’d have my eyes, just so that every time you held in your arms you’d see me there.”  
 _Maybe-green_ , Eilis thinks, somewhere in the fever. She knows what they’d look like.  
“You’d need more, so quickly. A year. Less. You'd tell him you were homesick, you needed your Ma, when you just need me to fuck you _full_ again.” His fingers twist in her at that, half-gone on his own fantasy, voice broken; she keens.  
“I want to give you this, Eilis. _Please_. I don't want you to go.” His tone is wretched. He pulls her back, then, so that they’re face to face, blushing cheek brushing nose. His eyelashes look nearly white, blurred-close. Thumb, fast and hard and perfect on her clit, fingers pressing in and up, fishhook curled because he’s caught her.  
“I want you to stay here--” and she thinks Jim says _with me_ but she isn't sure because she’s coming, white-hot and trembling, gasping into the space above his collar. He fucks her through it, slick-sloppy, much too much. Merciless.  
When the blood roaring in her has quelled enough to see again, to exist, even, she’s slumped boneless against his chest. She looks dizzily out across the slope of his shoulder, over the rigid chair-back, trying to grasp at the world. Hold it steady. Beyond the table, the window of the breakfast nook has been propped open, leaving the gauzy curtains to billow in the gentled, sun-drenched breeze. Suddenly, child-Jim is there, ducking in to call his mother outside for tea, grinning and joyful and effervescent as anything; _Or,_ she thinks, _maybe he was happy_.

Beyond the curtains, she can see the garden. Beyond that, the hills.

Jim gently pulls his fingers from inside her, watching with that tiny almost-smile, grazing his wet knuckles against her shivering belly. “More permanent than a ring,” he breathes. “I think.”

As hard as Eilis looks beyond the hills, there is nothing.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love tony :( I feel bad for my bb 
> 
> as always, tumblr is @floatin-on-bespin !


End file.
